US press denies reality like Amnesty International's Gulag charge

US press takes umbrage at Amnesty‘s ”gulag” charge

Joseph Kay and Barry Grey, WSWS

May 28 - 2005 - The American establishment press has reacted to the human rights report issued by Amnesty International with a combination of indignation and verbal mudslinging. The editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have taken particular offense at the statement by Amnesty International’s secretary general calling the US-run prison camp in Guantánamo Bay “the gulag of our times.”

The editorial boards of these two newspapers — one the mouthpiece of the extreme right and the other its “liberal” counterpart — have swallowed whole every lie and pro-war pretext dispensed by the Bush administration. They have done their best to promote a criminal war in Iraq and a policy of militarism and provocation throughout the world. But when an organization dares to speak with a certain degree of bluntness about the real substance of the US “war on terror” and Washington’s supposed crusade for democracy, they fairly froth at the mouth.

AMNESTY’S ‘GULAG

The Journal’s editorial, entitled “Amnesty’s ‘Gulag,’” begins by declaring that Amnesty International’s use of the term “gulag” is “one more sign of the moral degradation” of the organization. The Journal takes particular exception to the statement by the executive director of Amnesty’s US branch, William Shultz, that the US is a “leading purveyor and practitioner” of torture, as well as his suggestion that top American officials should think twice about vacationing outside the US, lest they “find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998.”

For the editors of the Wall Street Journal to accuse Amnesty International of “moral degradation” is a particularly brazen instance of projecting one’s own sins on one’s opponents. This is a newspaper that has championed every right-wing conspiracy against the democratic rights of the American people—from the scandal-mongering and attempted political coup against Clinton to the theft of the 2000 election. It has enthusiastically supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and justified the most criminal policies associated with these wars, including the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and the indefinite detention without charges of prisoners at Guantánamo.

Those who run the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, using half-truths, distortions and lies as their basic modus operandi, have earned for themselves an international reputation as journalistic thugs. - [end quote]

FPF: HAVE FUN: READ MORE ABOUT THE SQUIRMING AND LYING OF THE MSM - MAIN
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THE CENTRAL PRINCIPLE LAID DOWN AT THE NUREMBERG TRIALS: "PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND LIABILITY FOR WAR CRIMES: CRIMES AGAINST INTERNATIONAL LAW ARE COMMITTED BY MAN, NOT BY ABSTRACT ENTITIES. ONLY BY PUNISHING INDIVIDUALS WHO COMMIT SUCH CRIMES [CAN] THE PROVISIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW BE ENFORCED." NT - URL.: HTTP://TINYURL.COM/APXDO

HAVE A NICE WEEK-END!

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US and plane bomber: shameful rejection of Venezuela's extradition request

The Bush administration's shameful rejection

By COHA director Larry Birns and COHA research associate Joseph Taves

May 27, 2005 - The US State Department's summary and insulting rejection of the extradition request issued by the government of Venezuela for Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles was as shocking as it was predictable.

The decision not to hand over Posada to be tried for his alleged role in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner which 73 innocent people were killed does violence to this administration's respect for the rule of law.

Yet this is nothing new for a White House which has a long history of selective indignation towards villainous acts committed abroad.

Such a categorical rejection of the administration's own anti-terrorist rhetoric bears strong resemblance to its similarly hypocritical praise for the 2002 coup attempt against the democratically-elected Hugo Chavez, thus belying President Bush's supposed commitment to the spread of democracy throughout the hemisphere. Worst of all, the Department of State has dishonored this country's dead as a result of a terrorist act on September 11 by not honoring those murdered in 1976 when a bomb blew up on a Cuban Airlines flight over the Bahamas. A preponderance of evidence -- some of it from the FBI and the CIA -- and his subsequent acts of terror dispel any doubt that Posada is a world-class terrorist.

Just as it was entirely predictable that the Bush administration would reject the extradition request as a cheap slap in the face to its adversaries in Caracas, is the certain fate of Washington's already precipitous decline in its standing throughout Latin America. The moral cynicism behind the State Department's reluctance to extradite a major international terrorist suspect will certainly be pointed to by leaders of Latin America's "Pink Wave" as evidence of continued Yankee duplicity, and still another reason to disengage from the American hegemon.

While much of Latin America may be put off by Chavez' style, they are not inclined to give any credence to the State Department's claim that it does not extradite suspects for trial in a "kangaroo court." Foggy Bottom has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to extradite terrorist suspects to countries with a reputation for judicial integrity far below Venezuela's, such as Syria and Uzbekistan -- presumably because such lax judicial regulation will lead to the desired swift punishment for suspects.

Embarrassingly to the average American, the joke has been circulating for weeks that the State Department would choose to turn down Venezuela's extradition request for Posada on the eve of a Friday afternoon of a three-day national holiday, thus providing the slow news day environment in which indignation over his release would have time to cool down. This banal script was the exact one that the uncool Bush administration chose to follow.

But the administration's decision was a fait accompli long before it was actually hatched. It has repeatedly revealed its inability to learn from its ethical pratfalls and to live by its own pretentious but non-observed standards, as evidenced by Bush's nomination of the notorious intelligence manipulator, John Bolton, to be ambassador to the UN, and by the promotion of John Negroponte, who had a history of support for local death squads while he was Ambassador to Honduras. Additionally, the number two man in Bush's National Security Council, Elliot Abrams, was an irresistible candidate for his post because he had to be pardoned by the first President Bush for lying to Congress during Iran-Contra. This White House has done itself and the nation a disservice by choosing to pander to the powerful Cuban-American interest groups in Miami rather than demonstrate its genuine dedication to the war on terrorism.

With Posada, Washington had a choice of maintaining the integrity of its already deeply troubled antiterrorism crusade or to cater to its hard right Miami campaign donors and political backers. Lamentably, there was never any mystery as to which road Washington would choose to take.

[end item] - Axis of Logic - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/7trfa

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The Council on Hemispheric Affairs is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan research and information organization, described on the US Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” Information www.coha.org or telephone +1 (202) 216-9261, fax +1 (202) 223-6035, or email coha@coha.org

Latest news from Venezuela: Url.: http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=35714

Read an account of just one of this terrorist's bloody ventures in Jean-Guy Allard's interview of Livio Di Celma, brother of Fabio Di Celmo, killed by a Posada bomb in 1997. - Url.: http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_18017.shtml

Also, consider what the Bush family may have to risk were they to extradite Posada to Venezuela - Url.: http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_17881.shtml

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